SOAP (“Simple Object Access Protocol”) is a standard method for a client application running on one computer to request services from a server application running on another computer. SOAP encodes remote procedure calls into XML messages that are carried to the server by an HTTP transport protocol. By standardizing the protocol for this much-used service, SOAP eliminates protocol development redundancy and application-specific protocol variations. SOAP has been proposed to the Internet Engineering Task Force for consideration as an Internet communications standard. The proposal may be found at search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-box-http-soap-01.txt.
However, the proposed SOAP standard does not specify an application programming interface (API) to allow applications to easily use SOAP. Each applications development group must individually code the interactions between its application and the SOAP protocol, leading to resource waste through coding replication and possibly to interoperability errors when connecting applications written by different development groups. Therefore, the lack of a standard SOAP API directly counters some of the benefits hoped to be achieved by using SOAP.